After the Fall
by Takira
Summary: Just a brief introspective from a "future" hero facing down his own empty future...


Peace at last. Such peace. Nothing to do but watch all the sunsets I used to miss and listen to the birds I never heard over my own screams and plan more than one week ahead; I can be sure of living that long, now.

Perched atop the refurbished Capsule Corporation like some absurd gargoyle, I can watch my life's work: the people, smiling at last and working, unafraid...and so many children. They wasted no time rebuilding the reduced population; if nothing else, it gives them a greater sense of purpose in their efforts. We're building the world for our children--so they say. I suppose I can believe them. Mother did her best to build my world for me.

It's a favor I can't seem to return, though I'm not sure how much it matters. I was never certain of the assumption that the dead watched the living from heaven and hell. I would hope that mother had better things to do where she is than watch me waste the life she gave me.

Did that sound bitter? Understand, I don't regret devoting my life to the fight. I'm only glad she let me become what I had to be; I know she didn't always agree with it, especially at first. Perhaps she didn't understand what drove me to it, or maybe she knew too well, but by the end of things she'd resigned herself to the idea of me as android punching bag and savior of the world.

They call me that even now, sometimes; I wonder if they know how mocking it is. I went to the past to head this off...I went to assure that none of them existed, myself included. From the moment I arrived in that strangely familiar place, I was waiting to disappear. Even as I left, saying my cowardly silent goodbyes to those who hadn't known me, I half-expected that I would cease to be from the moment the time machine engaged.

...or maybe I was just hoping.

At any rate, it wasn't I that saved this world: it was my father's strength, my mother's genius and drive, Gohan's training, Gokuu's spirit, and, in the end, the sheer arrogance of the androids themselves. Cell didn't hesitate to kill me, and at that moment I realized just how close I'd truly been to death every day of my wretched life. It wasn't luck that kept me alive, and it sure as hell wasn't strength or skill or Gohan any other damned thing. They could have killed me any time they wanted to.

Sounds logical, doesn't it? Sounds like something I would have known all along. Sure, I knew it. I repeated it to myself, over and over. It was easy to do. I was young and invincible; I hadn't the vaguest concept of what death was...what it meant. Did they know, the slim monsters, that with a casual blow they could have assured their immortality? None would have risen after me; I was and am the only holder of Gohan's tattered legacy.

I will be the end of it. This world has seen the last of the Saiyajin, and dimly I am reminded that at least here, the race itself dies with me. I am the last thinned blood of a people that knew no master, that lived to fight and to kill...and here I sit, thinking myself complete for a lifetime of failures and two real killings to my name. Then again, do I answer to Saiyajin standards? I'm a piss-poor example of the race--I _look_ human. I _act_ human. I even used to cry like a human, only more often. Irony, then, that now...now that I've outlived the need for my Saiyajin heritage, I no longer cry. Call it irony. It's more polite than what I myself would call it.

They say the two strongest desires of man are to survive and to reproduce...to create life beyond his own. My survival was a fluke, and as to the other...no.

Just...no. I can't.

Mother only managed to drop a few hints that she wished to see her grandchildren before she died. At the time I had the traditional excuse: I was just looking for the right person. It wasn't until after mother died that I realized no such person existed. Gohan had never married, either, and now I can understand why. It divided your time, something like that, hindered your concentration. It gave you a weakness; love itself is a weakness...my weakness, I think. I let myself love this world and the people in it. So long I fought for those who couldn't fight, for those who'd died and were to die; every time I was beaten. When I returned, whatever my pious mind was setting forth as the reason, my subconscious wanted them dead on strictly personal terms. I didn't want to die again.

I didn't really think ahead to the fact that they couldn't, at that point, kill me, nor did I stop to wonder just what I'd do when they were dead. I acted without thinking and this world is alive because of that. So little pulled us through, the longer I think on it--there were so many points at which I almost failed, and yet they still hail me as their savior. I can't be upset with them; they don't know any better.

...but I begin to wonder if perhaps _I_ did.

I feel like I should confess, or something, tell them all to stop looking up to me. I'm not their savior, I'm not their idol, I'm not their future. I plunged this world into stasis and we'll be forever known as the bleak shadow of what was never meant to be. We're the mistake, the correction: I'm the one-shot prophet and almost-martyr. Sometimes at night I watch the cold stars and wonder if I shouldn't have _been_ a martyr...but it's too late now. I lost my right to die when I finished off Juunanagou without so much as a scratch on my skin. There is nothing strong enough to kill me now and there never will be. I will live until such point as I die of old age...or maybe I'll get a virus of my own. Amusing thought, that--if some punk from the future comes to save me, I'll just go back with him. They don't need me here anymore.

The time machine is in our new museum now, in a beautiful shiny glass case, all the dust sucked from the air before it can dull the heroic finish of the machine. I, myself, am gathering dust, and the longer I look at the polished hide of our salvation the stranger my dreams become. I see myself stealing in at night, boarding the ship--setting the coordinates for the far future, when I can be assured of finding a world long destroyed...or at least quiet enough for me to find solitude in which to die.

Seek our peace in our own dead future, we obsolete machines...


End file.
